A family mystery from the Great War

Now this metal notebook holder has been in the family for as long as I can remember.

It is small but quite heavy and  I am ashamed to say has suffered from being in the cellar.

Its metal exterior has been attacked by rust and I am looking at how best to restore it.

It carries the German Imperial Cross with the letter W and the date 1914, and given that my grandmother was German I assumed it belonged to one of her family.

But now I am not so sure.
The name inscribed on the front is not one I recognise.

Of course that doesn’t prove it is not one of our family but allows for some doubt.

Alternatively it could have been picked up on the Western Front by either my grandfather or great uncle Jack.

Both served in the British Army and both were in France.

Whatever its origins I do know that it passed to my uncle who served in the RAF and whose name, serial number and the words RAF were inscribed inside.

Uncle Roger enlisted in 1938 aged 16 and saw action in Greece, and Iraq before being captured by the Japanese in 1942 and died in a prisoner of war camp the following year aged just 21.

And that offers up a second mystery because it remained in our possession.  I very much doubt that had it headed out to the Far East with him it would have returned.

I am of course totally prepared to accept the commonsense explanation that he just left it behind for anyone of a number of reasons.

The German side of our family is the one that we have not explored and when we do we might find the answer to its original owner.

Sadly there is no one left to ask and had we not decided to clear out the middle cellar I suspect it would have been many more years before I came across it.

All of which is a lesson in how to look after family objects.  All too often because we have grown up with them we take the item for granted, and that can lead to neglect and eventually to the loss of the object.

So that is it.  The search has begun.  Leaving me only to reflect on the irony of the fact that it passed to my uncle who was in the RAF but like my mother had been born in Cologne.

Picture; metal notebook holder, circa 1914, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Snaps of Chorlton No 1 a lost road and a demolished house from Ida

In memory of Ida Bradshaw who died on New Year's Eve and whose funeral service too place yesterday in St Clements, here is the secondof three stories she inspired

Ida, 1941-2026

Most of the images we see of Chorlton in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were the work of professional photographers. 

They arrived in the township, focused on the popular bits and sold them on to the postcard companies.  Sometimes on the off chance they prowled the new roads of New Chorlton and the Ville, taking pictures of individual houses and offering them at a knock down rate to the residents.

Then there were the serious amateurs like Aaron Booth* who in the early 1880s was taking photographs of Martledge. But there are also the snappers, who captured whatever took their fancy.  Often the images are a little blurred and in many cases have a significance lost in time.

And so with this in mind here is the new series.  Snaps of Chorlton, is an occasional rummage through pictures most of which were never meant to be shared beyond the family. Of course the advent of the camera phone has given this a new lease of life.

But for now I am concentrating on old fashioned images and I am starting with two from Ida.  The first was taken by her dad and while the date is unknown it must be before the development of the precinct, because this is Manchester Road from the corner of Wilbraham Road.  Back then it is still a tree lined road of big houses which gently curved round past the Savoy Picture House and around the library.  The car park has yet to break the sweep of the road.

It is a scene I featured recently from a 1938 postcard but is well worth another look.

The second is more recent.  We are on Beech Road, after the demolition of Row House and the factory which stood beside it.  And Ida’s picture perfectly reflects that other thing about snaps which is that they seldom are of popular or photogenic views which makes them equally important.

Row House dated from the early 19^th century and had quite a history.  Here lived the Blomely’s who gave their name to the fish pond that ran from Acres Road up to Chequers Road, and also lived William Batty, politician, jeweller and Methodist  For a while the house was used as our “Penny Reading Room”, while the adjoining building had been a laundry and factory.

So its passing which generated a stir at the time is important as it was one of the last examples of an early 19^th century property in the township.  And here I have a confession, for I have a brick from the house.  I asked for it and the demolition gang a little bemused handed it over.  It was handmade, perhaps with clay from our own clay pits off Oswald Road and I guess was put in place around about 1800.

And a little later Ida took her picture.

Location; Chorlton, Manchester

Pictures; from the collection of Ida Bradshaw

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/aaron-booth-and-his-pictures-of.html

It started with a picture and became a story.......... Charles Ireland

The Palais de Luxe, circa 1928

It started with a picture and became a story.

The picture was of the Palais de Luxe Cinema on Barlow Moor Road and is not one I had seen before.

In that usual way of things it was in the possession of the archives and public records centre of East Dunbartonshire Council and got there because the fine iron and glass canopy which fronted the cinema had been made by the Lion Foundry in Kirkintilloch.

The story unfolded as the archivist and I sought to resolve the copyright issue of the photograph.

Ms Janice Miller was keen for me to see the picture but quite rightly was concerned that this might contravene the 70 year rule on copyright usage.

The photograph was by C Ireland and may have been taken around 1928 and that was all there was to go on. He might have been a local photographer or one especially commissioned by the Lion Foundry who came down from Scotland or just possibly one of those travelling photographers who captured local scenes to be converted into post cards.

Now both of us were fully prepared for a disappointment. After all we had just a name which is not much to go on.

But a Charles Ireland ran a photographic shop at 25 Lower Mosley Street in town during the first decade of the last century and continued in business there to at least 1927. The same set of telephone directories also revealed that by 1921 he was living at 76 High Lane here in Chorlton.

It is one of those amazing things about detective work that once the first secrets of a person’s life come to light others bubble up in front of you.

He had died in 1930 aged 63, left £5,330 to his widow and was buried in Southern Cemetery. He had been born in Newton in Manchester in 1867 and by 1891 the family were living here on St Clements Road.

This seems to have been a step up. The family home on Oldham Road in Newton was at the heart of an industrial area. Just to the north was the large carriage and wagon works of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and to the south and east there were brick works cotton mills, bleach works as well a glass works.

25 Lower Mosley Street, 1964

Charles’s father Edward was in partnership as a pawnbroker although he also described himself as a photographer, and by 1891 this appears to have been his sole occupation.

There were as yet few photographers listed in the directories for Manchester in the 1880s and they are still described as artists.

By 1895 he had opened the shop on Lower Mosley Street which Charles still ran until the late 1920s.

The family continued to prosper and by 1911 they have moved to that large detached house on the corner of Edge Lane and Kingshill Road.

76 High Lane, date unknown

As ever the romantic in me fastened on the fact that in 1913 Charles married his photographic assistant. Edith May Hindley was 32 years old and like him had been born in Newton.

Sometime perhaps around 1918 they moved into 76 High Lane which had been the home of the artist Tom Mostyn the artist.

 It is still there having benefited from the addition of the large upstairs window and studio which I guess was the work of Tom Mostyn and which Charles in turn may have used.

I have yet to visit the grave in Southern Cemetery but it is on my list of things to do. Here he was buried along with his father and mother in law, his sister and finally in 1948 his wife

So far no other pictures accredited to Charles have turned up but they will. His working life stretched back over 40 years and the picture of 76 High Lane may even be his although sadly there is no date and the quality is pretty poor.

But I travel in hope that out there in a collection I will come across more of his pictures. Ms Janice Miller and the East Dunbartonshire archive can only be the first.

Location; Chorlton and Manchester

Pictures; the Palais de Luxe cinema, circa 1928 GD10-07-04-6-13-01 Courtesy of East Dunbartonshire Archives, 25 Lower Mosley Street by H W Beaumont 1964 m02915, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, & 76 High Lane, date unknown, from the Lloyd collection

Henry IV Part 1 .... the discussion on the wireless about a favourite play

 I enjoyed this edition of  In Our Time, which discussed Shakespeare's Henry 1V Part 1.

Falstaff

"Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most successful of Shakespeare's plays in his own time. Written with no Part 2 in mind as 'Henry the Fourth', the play explores ideas about who can be a legitimate ruler and why, and how anyone can rightly succeed to the throne. 

This was an especially pressing question for his Tudor audience as Elizabeth I had named no successor. Playwrights, banned from openly discussing the jeopardy her subjects faced, turned to these themes of power, legitimacy and succession in distant and recent history. 

When Shakespeare combined this relevance with the vivid characters of Falstaff, Hotspur and Hal and with the tensions between noble fathers and sons, he had a play that fascinated well into the Jacobean era and has been revived throughout the centuries.

With; Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford, Lucy Munro, Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Kings College London, and Laurence Publicover, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Bristol

Producer; Simon Tillotson"

Picture; Falstaff, 1906, Eduard von Grützner 1846–1925

*Henry IV Part 1, BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002qth3

In Albert Square with dirty buildings and bus stops ……………1956

This is Albert Square in 1956, and while it would be a full thirteen years before I discovered it, the scene in front of us was pretty much the same.

Except of course for those soot blackened walls which were the product of a century of coal fires and other industrial pollution.

Not that Manchester was alone in this.  As a child playing in the local parks in Peckham, I could get pretty dirty from climbing the trees which like the buildings were caked in the stuff.

But when I arrived the Town Hall had just undergone a clean up.  And not before time.  The interior of the Town Hall had been cleaned in 1925, and although the Council in 1964 estimated it would cost £25,000 the project was delayed.

I am not quite sure why there was a time lapse, but Ian Nairn in an article for the Guardian in 1965,  had called for caution arguing that “such action could ruin the stone of many British buildings”, and asserting that some “town hall and stations have gone jet black, covered with a crystalline  deposit which sparkles in the sun and seems to defeat the gloom by annexing it to a deeper darkness”.*

Adding that in uncleaned these public buildings could “become lustrous pools of darkness in grime-free cities, appreciated for their innate qualities and freed from any moral taint of being ‘dirty’ or ‘clean’”.

It didn’t however seem a popular idea, and most people I met back in 1969 were very pleased with their newly cleaned Town Hall.

Whether they were equally happy after Albert Square was closed to buses and was no longer used as a car park is unknown to me.

But I suppose it must have taken a wee bit of adjustment, and that takes me back to the picture which offers up other fascinating details, like the presence of a J. Lyons Tea Room across the square, or the partial cleaning of the Northern Assurance Buildings.

There is more to discover but that I will leave for now.

Location; Manchester

Picture; Albert Square, 1956,Courtesy of Manchester Archives+ Town Hall Photographers' Collection,  https://www.flickr.com/photos/manchesterarchiveplus/albums/72157684413651581?fbclid=IwAR35NR9v6lzJfkiSsHgHdQyL2CCuQUHuCuVr8xnd403q534MNgY5g1nAZfY


*Think before you wash! Ian Nairn, The Guardian, June 27, 1965

Wishing you well ........... postcards from Woolwich, Greenwich and Eltham for the summer ..... nu 5 Greenwich Park

A short series with few words looking at the postcards we sent from Woolwich, Greenwich and Eltham.

Now I don’t think this scene of the park had changed over much between when it was sent to Miss L E Thompson of Shepherds Bush and when I played there a full half century and a bit later.

It is unclear whether “C S” lived in Greenwich.  He sent the card from west London just after midday in the August of 1902 and confined himself to the simple message “Isn’t it nice.”

Location; Greenwich Park

Picture; Greenwich Park circa 1902, Tuck and Sons, courtesy of Tuck DB, https://tuckdb.org/

In Almeria even the street grids are posh ….. and come with a bit of history

I have never made a secret of my fascination for street furniture, and of all these it is the humble cast iron cover which take pride of place in my collection.

They come in all shapes and sizes, bear the name of the municipality who made them and give access to a cornucopia of tunnels, drains and electrical installations.

And so well known is my fascination that friends send me pictures when ever they encounter one on a holiday or business trip.

All of which is a lead into these two fine grids.

They come from Almeria and Nijar.

My Wikipedia tells me that “Almería is a city and municipality of Spain, located in Andalusia. It is the capital of the province of the same name. The city lies in southeastern Iberia, extending primarily in between the eastern fringes of the Sierra de Gádor and the Andarax riverbed along the coastline of the Gulf of Almería, a large inlet of the Mediterranean Sea. The municipality has a population of 201,946”.*

While Wikipedia also records that "Níjar is a Spanish municipality in the province of Almería, Andalusia. It lies in the eastern part of Almería, in the Sierra de Alhamilla and the south-eastern Mediterranean coast, in the Campo de Níjar, near the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park.

The main sources of income are agriculture, especially in the growing of greenhouse crops, and tourism, especially the water sports centre of San José".**

To which I should add Almeria was the setting for the sixth season of Game of Thrones.

But enough of their collective histories, geography and much more all of which are out there for any one to find.

So instead I am back to the grids, both of which are posh enough to sport the coat of arms of their respective local authority which is a nice link to their past, leaving me just to include the inscription and translations on the covers “Saneamento Ayuntamiento Almeria” which translate into the less romantic “Sanitation Almeria City Council”, and “Ayuntamiento De Nijar Saneamiento” or “Nijar City Council Sanitation”.

And that is it.

Although just say to I am always looking out for covers for my collection.

Location; Almeria and Nijar

Pictures; grids from southern Spain, 2026, from a friend

*Almería, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Almer%C3%ADa

** **Nijar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%ADjar